There are currently six major foods sold in the U.S. that are typically genetically engineered. These are listed below with the percent that are GE:

Sugar beets 95%

Soybeans 93%

Cotton (Cottonseed oil) 78%

Canola 75%

Corn 70%

Papaya 50%

Because most of these are used widely, about two-thirds of processed food contains a GE ingredient. Conversely, the vast majority of raw fruits and vegetables are not GE. Organic foods, by definition, can’t be GE.

Does genetic engineering improve the nutritional quality of foods?

No. There are no GE foods on the market in which nutritional quality is enhanced beyond a non-GE food counterpart.

So why don’t we eat real foods?

GE foods make for more profits in pesticides, yields, and lower costs(?) at the expense of the animal or human eating them.

Unfortunately these GE foods create ulcers, disease and even death in humans.

So why don’t we eat real, unmodified foods? We look at the cost at the store of processed foods and expect our insurance to pay all of the medical bills it creates with disease and death.

Genetically Engineered organisms actually become part of the bacteria in our digestive tracts and reproduce continuously inside us. But the USDA now wants to remove all controls from GE corn and cotton!

There are no human clinical trials of genetically engineered foods. The only published human feeding experiment revealed that genetic material inserted into GE soy transfers into the DNA of bacteria living inside our intestines and continues to function. Even after we stop eating GE foods, we may still have the GE proteins produced continuously inside us.

As the Institute for Responsible Technology has noted, the genetic engineering process creates massive collateral damage, causing mutations in hundreds or thousands of locations throughout the plant’s DNA. Natural genes can be deleted or permanently turned on or off, and hundreds may change their behavior. Even the inserted gene can be damaged or rearranged, and may create proteins that can trigger allergies or promote disease.

The idea of having genetically engineered genes permanently living inside our guts has staggering implications:

*If the antibiotic gene inserted into most GM crops were to transfer, it could create antibiotic-resistant diseases.

*Bt toxins (Bacillus thuringiensis) inserted into GM food crops to kill pests are reaching the bloodstreams of 93% of women and 80% of unborn babies because of the consumption of meat, milk, and eggs from livestock fed GE corn. This could turn bacteria in our intestines into pesticide factories.

*Animal studies show that DNA in food can travel into organs throughout the body, even into the fetus.

Last week the New York Times wrote about an upcoming report from The President’s Cancer Panel. The paper was “astonish[ed] to learn that [the panel] is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: [these] chemicals threaten our bodies.”

If you doubt that Genetically Modified (GM) foods threaten your body, here is a recent report from Russian biologists. They conducted what they thought would be a “routine” study of the long-term effects of the consumption of GM soy feed among a hamster population. For the first generation, the only untoward effects seemed to be constipation. The second generation didn’t seem too much the worse for wear either. But the third generation showed serious ill effects and turned out to be completely sterile.

Hampsters are not human beings and more research needs to be done, but other studies also point to reproductive ill effects. Eating frankinfoods would not seem to be the best form of birth control! In addition to the unknown but increasingly documented risks of ingesting organisms that are completely new to the human body, we also need to worry about contaminants found in GM foods such as Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” herbicide.

Read the whole story in: http://www.anh-usa.org/genetically-modified-food-more-reason-to-avoid-them-and-why-they-threaten-organic-agriculture/ Alliance for Natural Health